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Emily Sun's book, "On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China," explores the shared modernity between British Romanticism and Republican China during a transitional period in literature and culture. Sun compares four pairs of asynchronous and heterogeneous texts to examine literary and global modernities. She argues that world literature connects different yet interconnected literatures and cultures, and she investigates how people have reorganized their lives in a global world, moving away from traditional literary and aesthetic traditions towards world modernities. Sun's analysis focuses on the genres of poetic manifesto, tale anthology, familiar essay, and novel to explore the formation of a shared global modernity across linguistic and geographical boundaries. [Extracted from the article]

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"Mapping Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism in Comparative Perspectives" is a book that explores the resurgence of realist theories and criticism in recent years. The book, which is the first volume in a two-part project, examines the ways in which realism has been formulated since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how it could be reconfigured in the future. The volume takes a collaborative and comparative approach, featuring co-authored articles and case studies that challenge preconceived notions about realism and its relationship to other literary styles. The book presents a convincing account of realism as both a historical and transhistorical term and sets the stage for further exploration in the second volume of the project. [Extracted from the article]

"Pathways Through Realism" is the second volume of "Landscapes of Realism," which aims to rethink and remap the history, poetics, and politics of realism in European and other languages from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries onwards. The volume focuses on four pathways through realism: the psychological, the referential, the formal, and the geographical. Each pathway is explored through a core essay and six case studies, providing in-depth analysis of various texts and non-verbal products. The volume also considers the intermediality between literature and other art forms. Overall, "Pathways Through Realism" offers a high scholarly standard and provides an alternative perspective to the narrative of European dominance. [Extracted from the article]

This review-article discusses Ian Duncan's groundbreaking book, which examines nineteenth-century narrative fiction in the light of natural science's approach to the origins of the human species and its place in the world. As Duncan explains, after Linneus and Buffon systematically classified all living species in the eighteenth century, Lamarck and Darwin focused on the specific processes involved in the biological transformation, diversification, and evolution of these species. Similarly, while David Hume and Immanuel Kant described what they assumed to be universal features of humanity, Herder and Hegel's writings emphasized the diversity of human cultures and the progressive movement of history. As Duncan shows, nineteenth-century authors looked beyond general human qualities in literature as well, turning their attention to the striking differences between historical periods, to the multiple links, harmonious or monstrous, between human beings and the organization of society, and to the impact of robust, independent individuals on societal development. Illuminating analyses of novels by Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot show the intimate convergence between nineteenth-century biological and historical theories of evolution and the rise of the realist novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents criticism of the 1861 short story "Life in the Iron-Mills," by American author Rebecca Harding Davis. Topics discussed include the way Davis depicted industrial labor practices particularly the impact of industrialism on the working class, the sentimental and realist narratives presented by Davis, and the significance of the character of the Korl-Woman which portrayed 19th century working-class women in the U.S.

A critique is presented of the 14th century English romance poem "Athelston," focusing on the political aspects of the poem and themes of nostalgia, brotherhood, and treason. The history of the interpretation of signs, realism in literature, and conflict between Church and state in England are discussed, as well as the divine role of the king in medieval England.

The text is a review of the book "A realibus ad realiora. Poesie e testi scelti" by Vja√ eslav I. IVANOV. The book is an introduction to Ivanov's proposed vision of art, which continues the ideas of V. Soloviev. The book includes a selection of the author's poems, as well as Book III of "The Legend of Prince Svetomir," an epic poem that was the result of two decades of the poet's work. It also includes the author's reflections on artistic creation and a selection of letters exchanged with other figures of his time. In summary, the book offers a vision of art as a theurgic act and divine communication. [Extracted from the article]

In "Outpost of Progress," a savagely comic story about two Belgian incompetents at a Congo trading station, Joseph Conrad offers the first postcolonial critique of Heart of Darkness, two years before it existed. The sardonic and innovative literary realism of "Outpost" connects imperial causes to horrific but intelligible colonial effects. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad mystified his earlier story, smudging its anti-imperial clarity, detaching causes and effects, turning both into free-floating modernist intensities. Renewed attention to "Outpost" helps us understand the continuing dialogue of realism and modernism in Conrad's fiction (for instance, in Nostromo) and in world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]